With the rise of the mobile internet, OTT media services has developed rapidly, and performing the transmission and the playing of video streams based on file downloading has become a solution adopted by most of video websites.
A Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) Live Streaming (HLS) protocol is widely used. According to the HLS protocol, a media stream may be converted into a media index file and a plurality of media fragmentation files in a slicing manner. In a video-on-demand process, a player terminal may request the media index file using the HTTP, parse out addresses of the media fragmentation files, download the media fragmentation files through the HTTP, and play the media fragmentation files. In a live streaming process, fragmentation file information may also be regularly updated into a media index file, a player terminal may pull the index file circularly to acquire updated media file address information, and then pull updated fragmentation files to realize a live stream.
In the foregoing transmission modes, each terminal player may need to establish a plurality of short links with a server, and a process of establishing a link, downloading a file and releasing the link has to be separately carried out for each media index file and each media fragmentation file, reducing the performance of the server tremendously. To guarantee a reliable viewing quality, the service provider may need to deploy a great number of media servers and distributed networks, leading to a huge investment.
No effective solutions have been proposed to address a problem that the transmission of media streams tremendously consumes resources of a server.